Author: C .T.

A hostile elite

Why every decent person should become
an anti-Semite: First reason

Today I read “Stalin’s willing executioners: Jews as a hostile elite in the USSR” by Prof. Kevin MacDonald: a book-review of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century (Princeton University Press, 2004).

Since MacDonald’s magnificent review is 17,000 words, I decided to cut it by half. Endnotes can be read in the original article (no ellipsis added between unquoted paragraphs):

A persistent theme among critics of Jews—particularly those on the pre-World War II right—has been that the Bolshevik revolution was a Jewish revolution and that the Soviet Union was dominated by Jews. This theme appears in a wide range of writings, from Henry Ford’s International Jew, to published statements by a long list of British, French, and American political ﬁgures in the 1920s (Winston Churchill, Woodrow Wilson, and David Lloyd George), and, in its most extreme form, by Adolf Hitler, who wrote:

Now begins the last great revolution. By wresting political power for himself, the Jew casts off the few remaining shreds of disguise he still wears. The democratic plebeian Jew turns into the blood Jew and the tyrant of peoples. In a few years he will try to exterminate the national pillars of intelligence and, by robbing the peoples of their natural spiritual leadership, will make them ripe for the slavish lot of a permanent subjugation. The most terrible example of this is Russia.

Jewish involvement in the Communist elite of the USSR can be seen as a variation on an ancient theme in Jewish culture rather than a new one sprung from the special circumstances of the Bolshevik Revolution. Rather than being the willing agents of exploitative non-Jewish elites who were clearly separated from both the Jews and the people they ruled, Jews became an entrenched part of an exploitative and oppressive elite in which group boundaries were blurred. This blurring of boundaries was aided by four processes, all covered by Slezkine: shedding overt Jewish identities in favor of a veneer of international socialism in which Jewish identity and ethnic networking were relatively invisible; seeking lower-proﬁle positions in order to de-emphasize Jewish preeminence (e.g., Trotsky); adopting Slavic names; and engaging in a limited amount of intermarriage with non-Jewish elites. Indeed, the “plethora of Jewish wives” among non-Jewish leaders doubtless heightened the Jewish atmosphere of the top levels of the Soviet government.

When Jews won the economic competition in early modern Poland, the result was that the great majority of Poles were reduced to the status of agricultural laborers supervised by Jewish estate managers in an economy in which trade, manufacturing, and artisanry were in large part controlled by Jews.

Slezkine does note that the rise of the Jews in the USSR came at the expense of the Germans as a Mercurian minority in Russia prior to the Revolution.

Or rather, the Russian Germans were to Russia what the German Jews were to Germany—only much more so. So fundamental were the German Mercurians to Russia’s view of itself that both their existence and their complete and abrupt disappearance have been routinely taken for granted (pp. 113–114).

The difference between the Jews and the Germans was that the Jews had a longstanding visceral antipathy, out of past historical grievances, both real and imagined. Vladimir Purishkevich, accused the Jews of “irreconcilable hatred of Russia and everything Russian.”

In this respect, the Germans were far more like the Overseas Chinese, in that they became an elite without having an aggressively hostile attitude toward the people and culture they administered and dominated economically. Thus when Jews achieved power in Russia, it was as a hostile elite with a deep sense of historic grievance. As a result, they became willing executioners of both the people and cultures they came to rule, including the Germans.

After the Revolution, not only were the Germans replaced, but there was active suppression of any remnants of the older order and their descendants.

* * *

Slezkine sees the United States as a Jewish promised land precisely because it is not deﬁned tribally and “has no state-bearing natives” (p. 369). But the recasting of the United States as a “proposition nation” was importantly inﬂuenced by the triumph of several Jewish intellectual and political movements more than it was a natural and inevitable culmination of American history. These movements collectively delegitimized cultural currents of the early twentieth century whereby many Americans thought of themselves as members of a very successful ethnic group.

For example, the immigration restrictionists of the 1920s unabashedly asserted the right of European-derived peoples to the land they had conquered and settled. Americans of northern European descent in the United States thought of themselves as part of a cultural and ethnic heritage extending backward in time to the founding of the country, and writers like Madison Grant (The Passing of the Great Race) and Lothrop Stoddard (The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy) had a large public following. At that time both academia and mainstream culture believed in the reality of race; that there were important differences between the races, including in intelligence and moral character; and that races naturally competed for land and other resources.

It is no stretch at all, however, to show that Jews have achieved a preeminent position in Europe and America, and Slezkine provides us with statistics of Jewish domination only dimly hinted at in the following examples from Europe in the late nineteenth century to the rise of National Socialism. Austria: All but one bank in ﬁn de siècle Vienna was administered by Jews, and Jews constituted 70% of the stock exchange council; Hungary: between 50 and 90 percent of all industry was controlled by Jewish banking families, and 71% of the most wealthy taxpayers were Jews; Germany: Jews were overrepresented among the economic elite by a factor of 33. Similar massive overrepresentation was also to be found in educational attainment and among professionals (e.g., Jews constituted 62% of the lawyers in Vienna in 1900, 25% in Prussia in 1925, 34% in Poland, and 51% in Hungary). Indeed,

the universities, “free” professions, salons, coffeehouses, concert halls, and art galleries in Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest became so heavily Jewish that liberalism and Jewishness became almost indistinguishable (p. 63).

Slezkine documents the well-known fact that, as Moritz Goldstein famously noted in 1912, “We Jews administer the spiritual possessions of Germany.” However, he regards Jewish cultural dominance, not only in Germany but throughout Eastern Europe and Austria, as completely benign: “The secular Jews’ love of Goethe, Schiller, and the other Pushkins—as well as the various northern forests they represented—was sincere and tender” (p. 68).

But the Germans, from Wagner to von Treitschke to Chamberlain and Hitler, didn’t see it that way. For example, Heinrich von Treitschke, a prominent nineteenth-century German intellectual, complained of Heine’s “mocking German humiliation and disgrace following the Napoleonic wars” and Heine’s having “no sense of shame, loyalty, truthfulness, or reverence.” Nor does he mention von Treitschke’s comment that “what Jewish journalists write in mockery and satirical remarks against Christianity is downright revolting”; “about the shortcomings of the Germans [or] French, everybody could freely say the worst things; but if somebody dared to speak in just and moderate terms about some undeniable weakness of the Jewish character, he was immediately branded as a barbarian and religious persecutor by nearly all of the newspapers.”

The main weapons Jews used against national cultures were two quintessentially modern ideologies, Marxism and Freudianism, “both [of which] countered nationalism’s quaint tribalism with a modern (scientiﬁc) path to wholeness” (p. 80). Slezkine correctly views both of these as Jewish ideologies functioning as organized religions, with sacred texts promising deliverance from earthly travail. While most of his book recounts the emergence of a Jewish elite under the banner of Marxism in the Soviet Union, his comments on psychoanalysis bear mentioning. Psychoanalysis “moved to the United States to reinforce democratic citizenship with a much-needed new prop…. In America, where nationwide tribal metaphors could not rely on theories of biological descent, Freudianism came in very handy indeed” by erecting the “Explicitly Therapeutic State” (pp. 79–80).

[Chechar’s note: See, e.g., my own critique of the therapeutic state in Spanish: here]

The establishment of the Explicitly Therapeutic State was much aided by yet another Jewish intellectual movement, the Frankfurt School, which combined psychoanalysis and Marxism. The result was a culture of critique which fundamentally aimed not only at delegitimizing the older American culture, but even attempted to alter or obliterate human nature itself: “The statistical connection between ‘the Jewish question’ and the hope for a new species of mankind seems fairly strong” (p. 90).

And when people don’t cooperate in becoming a new species, there’s always murder. Slezkine describes Walter Benjamin, an icon of the Frankfurt School and darling of the current crop of postmodern intellectuals, “with glasses on his nose, autumn in his soul and vicarious murder in his heart” (p. 216), a comment that illustrates the ﬁne line between murder and cultural criticism, especially when engaged in by ethnic outsiders. Indeed, on another occasion, Benjamin stated, “Hatred and [the] spirit of sacriﬁce… are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.” Although Slezkine downplays this aspect of Jewish motivation, Jews’ lachrymose perceptions of their history—their images of enslaved ancestors—were potent motivators of the hatred unleashed by the upheavals of the twentieth century.

Slezkine is entirely correct that Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the Frankfurt School were fundamentally Jewish intellectual movements. However, he fails to provide anything like a detailed account of how these ideologies served speciﬁcally Jewish interests, most generally in combating anti-Semitism and subverting ethnic identiﬁcation among Europeans. Indeed, a major premise of his treatment is that Jewish radicals were not Jews at all.

* * *

In both the Soviet Union and Poland, Communism was seen as opposing anti-Semitism. In marked contrast, during the 1930s the Polish government enacted policies which excluded Jews from public-sector employment, established quotas on Jewish representation in universities and the professions, and organized boycotts of Jewish businesses and artisans. Clearly, Jews perceived Communism as good for Jews, and indeed a major contribution of Slezkine’s book is to document that Communism was good for Jews: It was a movement that never threatened Jewish group continuity, and it held the promise of Jewish power and inﬂuence and the end of state-sponsored anti-Semitism. And when this group achieved power in Poland after World War II, they liquidated the Polish nationalist movement, outlawed anti-Semitism, and established Jewish cultural and economic institutions.

As Slezkine himself notes, Jews were the only group that was not criticized by the revolutionary movement (p. 157), even though most Russians, and especially the lower classes whose cause they were supposedly championing, had very negative attitudes toward Jews. When, in 1915, Maxim Gorky, a strong philosemite, published a survey of Russian attitudes toward Jews, the most common response was typiﬁed by the comment that “the congenital, cruel, and consistent egoism of the Jews is everywhere victorious over the good-natured, uncultured, trusting Russian peasant or merchant” (p. 159). There were concerns that all of Russia would pass into Jewish hands and that Russians would become slaves of the Jews.

BOLSHEVISM AS A JEWISH REVOLUTION

But if Jews dominated radical and revolutionary organizations, they were immeasurably aided by philosemites like Gorky who, in Albert Lindemann’s term, were “jewiﬁed non-Jews” — “a term, freed of its ugly connotations, [that] might be used to underline an often overlooked point: Even in Russia there were some non-Jews, whether Bolsheviks or not, who respected Jews, praised them abundantly, imitated them, cared about their welfare, and established intimate friendships or romantic liaisons with them.” (As noted above, many of the non-Jewish elite in the USSR had Jewish wives.) What united the Jews and philosemites was their hatred for what Lenin (who had a Jewish grandfather) called “the thick-skulled, boorish, inert, and bearishly savage Russian or Ukrainian peasant” — the same peasant Gorky described as “savage, somnolent, and glued to his pile of manure” (p. 163). It was attitudes like these that created the climate that justiﬁed the slaughter of many millions of peasants under the new regime. Philosemites continued to be common among the non-Jewish elite in the USSR, even in the 1950s, when Jews began to be targeted as Jews.

Gorky’s love for the Jews was boundless. Despite the important role of Jews among the Bolsheviks, most Jews were not Bolsheviks before the revolution. However, Jews were prominent among the Bolsheviks, and once the revolution was under way, the vast majority of Russian Jews became sympathizers and active participants. Jews were particularly visible in the cities and as leaders in the army and in the revolutionary councils and committees. For example, there were 23 Jews among the 62 Bolsheviks in the All-Russian Central Executive Committee elected at the Second Congress of Soviets in October, 1917. Jews were the leaders of the movement, and to a great extent they were its public face. Slezkine quotes historian Mikhail Beizer who notes, commenting on the situation in Leningrad, that “Jewish names were constantly popping up in newspapers. Jews spoke relatively more often than others at rallies, conferences, and meetings of all kinds.”

In general, Jews were deployed in supervisory positions rather than positions that placed them in physical danger. In a Politburo meeting of April 18, 1919, Trotsky urged that Jews be redeployed because there were relatively few Jews in frontline combat units, while Jews constituted a “vast percentage” of the Cheka at the front and in the Executive Committees at the front and at the rear. This pattern had caused “chauvinist agitation” in the Red Army (p. 187).

Jewish representation at the top levels of the Cheka and OGPU (the acronyms by which the secret police was known in different periods) has often been the focus of those stressing Jewish involvement in the revolution and its aftermath. Slezkine provides statistics on Jewish overrepresentation in these organizations, especially in supervisory roles, and agrees with Leonard Schapiro’s comment that “anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of ﬁnding himself confronted with and possibly shot by a Jewish investigator” (p. 177). During the 1930s the secret police, then known as the NKVD, “was one of the most Jewish of all Soviet institutions” (p. 254), with 42 of its 111 top ofﬁcials being Jewish. At this time 12 of the 20 NKVD directorates were headed by ethnic Jews, including those in charge of state security, police, labor camps, and resettlement (i.e., deportation). The Gulag was headed by ethnic Jews from its beginning in 1930 until the end of 1938, a period that encompasses the worst excesses of the Great Terror. They were, in Slezkine’s words, “Stalin’s willing executioners” (p. 103).

The Bolsheviks continued to apologize for Jewish overrepresentation until the topic became taboo in the 1930s. And it was not until the late 1930s that there was a rise in visibility and assertiveness of “anti-Semites, ethnic nationalists, and advocates of proportional representation” (p. 188). By this time the worst of the slaughters in the Gulag, the purges, and the contrived famines had been completed.

The prominence of Jews in the Revolution and its aftermath was not lost on participants on both sides, including inﬂuential ﬁgures such as Winston Churchill, who wrote that the role of Jews in the revolution “is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others.” Slezkine highlights similar comments in a book published in 1927 by V. V. Shulgin, a Russian nationalist, who experienced ﬁrsthand the murderous acts of the Bolsheviks in his native Kiev in 1919:

We do not like the fact that this whole terrible thing was done on the Russian back and that it has cost us unutterable losses. We do not like the fact that you, Jews, a relatively small group within the Russian population, participated in this vile deed out of all proportion to your numbers (p. 181; italics in original).

Slezkine does not disagree with this assessment, but argues that Jews were hardly the only revolutionaries (p. 180). This is certainly true, but does not affect my argument that Jewish involvement was a necessary condition, not merely a sufﬁcient condition, for the success of the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath. Slezkine’s argument clearly supports the Jews-as-necessary-condition claim, especially because of his emphasis on the leadership role of Jews.

However, the claim that Jewish involvement was a necessary condition is itself an understatement because, as Shulgin noted, the effectiveness of Jewish revolutionaries was far out of proportion to the number of Jews. A claim that a group constituting a large proportion of the population was necessary to the success of a movement would be unexceptional. But the critical importance of Jews occurred even though Jews constituted less than 5% of the Russian population around the time of the Revolution, and they were much less represented in the major urban areas of Moscow and Leningrad prior to the Revolution because they were prevented from living there by the Pale of Settlement laws. Slezkine is correct that Jews were not the only revolutionaries, but his point only underscores the importance of philosemitism and other alliances Jews typically must make in Diaspora situations in order to advance their perceived interests.

In 1923, several Jewish intellectuals published a collection of essays admitting the “bitter sin” of Jewish complicity in the crimes of the Revolution. In the words of a contributor, I. L. Bikerman, “it goes without saying that not all Jews are Bolsheviks and not all Bolsheviks are Jews, but what is equally obvious is that disproportionate and immeasurably fervent Jewish participation in the torment of half-dead Russia by the Bolsheviks” (p. 183). Many of the commentators on Jewish Bolsheviks noted the “transformation” of Jews: In the words of another Jewish commentator, G. A. Landau, “cruelty, sadism, and violence had seemed alien to a nation so far removed from physical activity.” And another Jewish commentator, Ia. A Bromberg, noted that:

the formerly oppressed lover of liberty had turned into a tyrant of “unheard-of-despotic arbitrariness”… The convinced and unconditional opponent of the death penalty not just for political crimes but for the most heinous offenses, who could not, as it were, watch a chicken being killed, has been transformed outwardly into a leather-clad person with a revolver and, in fact, lost all human likeness (pp. 183–184).

This psychological “transformation” of Russian Jews was probably not all that surprising to the Russians themselves, given Gorky’s ﬁnding that Russians prior to the Revolution saw Jews as possessed of “cruel egoism” and that they were concerned about becoming slaves of the Jews. Gorky himself remained a philosemite to the end, despite the prominent Jewish role in the murder of approximately twenty million of his ethnic kin, but after the Revolution he commented that “the reason for the current anti-Semitism in Russia is the tactlessness of the Jewish Bolsheviks. The Jewish Bolsheviks, not all of them but some irresponsible boys, are taking part in the deﬁling of the holy sites of the Russian people. They have turned churches into movie theaters and reading rooms without considering the feelings of the Russian people.” However, Gorky did not blame the Jews for this: “The fact that the Bolsheviks sent the Jews, the helpless and irresponsible Jewish youths, to do these things, does smack of provocation, of course. But the Jews should have refrained” (p. 186).

Those who carried out the mass murder and dispossession of the Russian peasants saw themselves, at least in their public pronouncements, as doing what was necessary in pursuit of the greater good. This was the ofﬁcial view not only of the Soviet Union, where Jews formed a dominant elite, but also was the “more or less ofﬁcial view” among Jewish intellectuals in the United States (p. 215) and elsewhere.

THE THREE GREAT JEWISH MIGRATIONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Slezkine’s last and longest chapter describes the three great Jewish migrations of the twentieth century—to Israel, to America, and to the urban centers of the Soviet Union. Slezkine perceives all three through the lens of heroic Jewish self-perception. He sees the United States as a Jewish utopia precisely because it had only a “vestigial establishment tribalism” (p. 209) that could not long inhibit Jewish ascendancy:

The United States stood for unabashed Mercurianism, nontribal statehood, and the supreme sovereignty of capitalism and professionalism. It was—rhetorically—a collection of homines rationalistici artiﬁciales, a nation of strangers held together by a common celebration of separateness (individualism) and rootlessness (immigration) (p. 207).

It was the only modern state “…in which a Jew could be an equal citizen and a Jew at the same time. ‘America’ offered full membership without complete assimilation. Indeed, it seemed to require an afﬁliation with a subnational community as a condition of full membership in the political nation” (p. 207). Slezkine sees post-World War II America as a Jewish utopia but seems only dimly aware that Jews to a great extent created their own utopia in the U.S. by undermining nativist sentiments that were common at least until after World War II. Slezkine emphasizes the Jewish role in institutionalizing the therapeutic state, but sees it as completely benign, rather than an aspect of the “culture of critique” that undermined the ethnic identities of white Americans: “By bringing Freudianism to America and by adopting it, brieﬂy, as a salvation religion, [Jews] made themselves more American while making America more therapeutic” (p. 319). There is little discussion of the main anti-nativist intellectual movements, all of which were dominated by ethnically conscious Jews: Boasian anthropology, Horace Kallen and the development of the theory of America as a “proposition nation,” and the Frankfurt School which combined psychoanalysis and Marxism into a devastating weapon against the ethnic consciousness of white Americans. Nor does he discuss the role of Jewish activist organizations in altering the ethnic balance of the United States by promoting large-scale immigration from around the world.

But Slezkine spends most of his energy by far in providing a fascinating chronicle of the Jewish rise to elite status in all areas of Soviet society—culture, the universities, professional occupations, the media, and government. In all cases, Jewish overrepresentation was most apparent at the pinnacles of success and inﬂuence. To take just the area of culture, Jews were highly visible as avant-garde artists, formalist theorists, polemicists, moviemakers, and poets. They were “among the most exuberant crusaders against ‘bourgeois’ habits during the Great Transformation; the most disciplined advocates of socialist realism during the ‘Great Retreat’ (from revolutionary internationalism); and the most passionate prophets of faith, hope, and combat during the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis” (p. 225). And, as their critics noticed, Jews were involved in anti-Christian propaganda. Mikhail Bulgakov, a Russian writer, noticed that the publishers of Godless magazine were Jews; he was “stunned” to ﬁnd that Christ was portrayed as “a scoundrel and a cheat. It is not hard to see whose work it is. This crime is immeasurable” (p. 244).

* * *

Some of the juxtapositions are striking and seemingly intentional. On p. 230, Lev Kopelev is quoted on the need for ﬁrmness in conﬁscating the property of the Ukrainian peasants. Kopelev, who witnessed the famine that killed seven to ten million peasants, stated, “You mustn’t give in to debilitating pity. We are the agents of historical necessity. We are fulﬁlling our revolutionary duty. We are procuring grain for our socialist Fatherland. For the Five-Year Plan.” On the next page, Slezkine describes the life of the largely Jewish elite in Moscow and Leningrad, where they attended the theater, sent their children to the best schools, had peasant women for nannies, spent weekends at pleasant dachas, and vacationed at the Black Sea.

Slezkine describes the NKVD as “one of the most Jewish of all Soviet institutions” and recounts the Jewish leadership of the Great Terror of the 1930s (pp. 254 and 255). On p. 256, he writes that in 1937 the prototypical Jew who moved from the Pale of Settlement to Moscow to man elite positions in the Soviet state “probably would have been living in elite housing in downtown Moscow…with access to special stores, a house in the country (dacha), and a live-in peasant nanny or maid…” (p. 256), but the reader is left to his own imagination to visualize the horrors of the Ukrainian famine and the liquidation of the Kulaks.

As Slezkine notes, most of the Soviet elite were not Jews, but Jews were far overrepresented among the elite (and Russians far underrepresented as a percentage of the population). Moreover, the Jews formed a far more cohesive core than the rest of the elite because of their common social and cultural background (p. 236). The common understanding that the new elite had a very large Jewish representation resulted in pervasive anti-Jewish attitudes. In 1926, an Agitprop report noted:

The sense that the Soviet regime patronizes the Jews, that it is ‘the Jewish government,’ that the Jews cause unemployment, housing shortages, college admissions problems, price rises, and commercial speculation—this sense is instilled in the workers by all the hostile elements… If it does not encounter resistance, the wave of anti-Semitism threatens to become, in the very near future, a serious political question (p. 244).

Such widespread public perceptions about the role of Jews in the new government led to aggressive surveillance and repression of anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior, including the execution of Russian nationalists who expressed anti-Jewish attitudes. These public perceptions also motivated Jews to adopt a lower proﬁle in the regime, as with Trotsky, who refused the post of commissar of internal affairs because it might lend further ammunition to the anti-Jewish arguments. From 1927 to 1932 Stalin established an ambitious public campaign to combat anti-Semitism that included ﬁfty-six books published by the government and an onslaught of speeches, mass rallies, newspaper articles, and show trials “aimed at eradicating the evil” (p. 249).

THE DECLINE OF THE JEWS IN THE SOVIET UNION

Jews were able to maintain themselves as an elite until the end of the Soviet regime in 1991. On the whole, Jews were underrepresented as victims of the Great Terror. Jews also retained their elite status despite Stalin’s campaign in the late 1940s against Jewish ethnic and cultural institutions and their spokesmen.

Slezkine shows the very high percentages of Jews in various institutions in the late 1940s, including the universities, the media, the foreign service, and the secret police. The campaign against the Jews began only after the apogee of mass murder and deportations in the USSR.

Unlike the purges of the 1930s that sometimes targeted Jews as member of the elite (albeit at far less than their percentage of the elite), the anti-Jewish actions of the late 1940s and early 1950s were targeted at Jews because of their ethnicity. Similar purges were performed throughout Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe (pp. 313–314). “All three regimes [Poland, Romania, Hungary] resembled the Soviet Union of the 1920s insofar as they combined the ruling core of the old Communist underground, which was heavily Jewish, with a large pool of upwardly mobile Jewish professionals, who were, on average, the most trustworthy among the educated and the most educated among the trustworthy” (p. 314). Speaking of the situation in Poland, Khrushchev supported the anti-Jewish purge with his remark that “you have already too many Abramoviches.”

Whereas in the 1920s and 1930s children of the pillars of the old order were discriminated against, now Jews were not only being purged because of their vast overrepresentation among the elite, but were being discriminated against in university admissions. Jews, the formerly loyal members of the elite and willing executioners of the bloodiest regime in history, now “found themselves among the aliens” (p. 310).

And so began the exodus of Jews. Stalin died and the anti-Jewish campaign ﬁzzled, but the Jewish trajectory was deﬁnitely downhill. Jews retained their elite status and occupational proﬁle until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, but “the special relationship between the Jews and the Soviet state had come to an end—or rather, the unique symbiosis in pursuit of world revolution had given way to a unique antagonism over two competing and incommensurate nationalisms” (p. 330). A response of the Russians was “massive afﬁrmative action” (p. 333) aimed at giving greater representation to underrepresented ethnic groups. Jews were targets of suspicion because of their ethnic status, barred from some elite institutions, and limited in their opportunities for advancement.

The Russians were taking back their country, and it wasn’t long before Jews became leaders of the dissident movement and began to seek to emigrate in droves to the United States, Western Europe, and Israel.

Applications to leave the USSR increased dramatically after Israel’s Six-Day War of 1967, which, as in the United States and Eastern Europe, resulted in an upsurge of Jewish identiﬁcation and ethnic pride. The ﬂoodgates were eventually opened by Gorbachev in the late 1980s, and by 1994, 1.2 million Soviet Jews had emigrated — 43% of the total. By 2002, there were only 230,000 Jews left in the Russian Federation, 0.16% of the population. These remaining Jews nevertheless exhibit the typical Ashkenazi pattern of high achievement and overrepresentation among the elite, including six of the seven oligarchs who emerged in control of the Soviet economy and media in the period of de-nationalization (p. 362).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this dénouement did not result in any sense of collective guilt among Soviet Jews (p. 345) or among their American apologists. Indeed, American Jewish media ﬁgures who were blacklisted because of Communist afﬁliations in the 1940s are now heroes, honored by the ﬁlm industry, praised in newspapers, their work exhibited in museums.

At the same time, the cause of Soviet Jews and their ability to emigrate became a critical rallying point for American Jewish activist organizations and a deﬁning feature of neoconservatism as a Jewish intellectual and political movement. (For example, Richard Perle, a key neoconservative, was Senator Henry Jackson’s most important security advisor from 1969 to 1979 and organized Congressional support for the Jackson-Vanik Amendment linking US-Soviet trade to the ability of Jews to emigrate from the Soviet Union. The bill was passed over strenuous opposition from the Nixon administration.) Jewish activist organizations and many Jewish historians portray the Soviet Jewish experience as a sojourn in the land of the “Red Pharaohs” (p. 360). The historical legacy is that Jews were the passive, uncomprehending victims of the White armies, the Nazis, the Ukrainian nationalists, and the postwar Soviet state, nothing more.

THE ISSUE OF JEWISH CULPABILITY

Alexander Solzhenitsyn calls on Jews to accept moral responsibility for the Jews who “took part in the iron Bolshevik leadership and, even more so, in the ideological guidance of a huge country down a false path… [and for the Jewish role in the] Cheka executions, the drowning of the barges with the condemned in the White and Caspian Seas, collectivization, the Ukrainian famine—in all the vile acts of the Soviet regime” (quoted on p. 360). But according to Slezkine, there can be no collective guilt.

There can be little doubt that Lenin’s contempt for “the thick-skulled, boorish, inert, and bearishly savage Russian or Ukrainian peasant” was shared by the vast majority of shtetl Jews prior to the Revolution and after it. Those Jews who deﬁled the holy places of traditional Russian culture and published anti-Christian periodicals doubtless reveled in their tasks for entirely Jewish reasons, and, as Gorky worried, their activities not unreasonably stoked the anti-Semitism of the period.

Given the anti-Christian attitudes of traditional shtetl Jews, it is very difﬁcult to believe that the Jews engaged in campaigns against Christianity did not have a sense of revenge against the old culture that they held in such contempt. Indeed, Slezkine reviews some of the works of early Soviet Jewish writers that illustrate the revenge theme. The amorous advances of the Jewish protagonist of Eduard Bagritsky’s poem “February” are rebuffed by a Russian girl, but their positions are changed after the Revolution when he becomes a deputy commissar. Seeing the girl in a brothel, he has sex with her without taking off his boots, his gun, or his trench coat—an act of aggression and revenge:

I am taking you because so timid
Have I always been, and to take vengeance
For the shame of my exiled forefathers
And the twitter of an unknown ﬂedgling!
I am taking you to wreak my vengeance
On the world I could not get away from!

Slezkine seems comfortable with revenge as a Jewish motive. [His] argument that Jews were critically involved in destroying traditional Russian institutions, liquidating Russian nationalists, murdering the tsar and his family, dispossessing and murdering the kulaks, and destroying the Orthodox Church has been made by many other writers over the years, including Igor Shafarevich, a mathematician and member of the prestigious U. S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Shafarevich’s review of Jewish literary works during the Soviet and post-Soviet period agrees with Slezkine in showing Jewish hatred mixed with a powerful desire for revenge toward pre-revolutionary Russia and its culture.

But Shafarevich also suggests that the Jewish “Russophobia” that prompted the mass murder is not a unique phenomenon, but results from traditional Jewish hostility toward the non-Jewish world, considered tref (unclean), and toward non-Jews themselves, considered subhuman and as worthy of destruction. Both Shafarevich and Slezkine review the traditional animosity of Jews toward Russia, but Slezkine attempts to get his readers to believe that shtetl Jews were magically transformed in the instant of Revolution; although they did carry out the destruction of traditional Russia and approximately twenty million of its people, they did so only out of the highest humanitarian motives and the dream of utopian socialism, only to return to an overt Jewish identity because of the pressures of World War II, the rise of Israel as a source of Jewish identity and pride, and anti-Jewish policies and attitudes in the USSR.

This is simply not plausible.

* * *

The situation prompts reﬂection on what might have happened in the United States had American Communists and their sympathizers assumed power. The “red diaper babies” came from Jewish families which “around the breakfast table, day after day, in Scarsdale, Newton, Great Neck, and Beverly Hills have discussed what an awful, corrupt, immoral, undemocratic, racist society the United States is.” Indeed, hatred toward the peoples and cultures of non-Jews and the image of enslaved ancestors as victims of anti-Semitism have been the Jewish norm throughout history—much commented on, from Tacitus to the present.

It is easy to imagine which sectors of American society would have been deemed overly backward and religious and therefore worthy of mass murder by the American counterparts of the Jewish elite in the Soviet Union—the ones who journeyed to Ellis Island instead of Moscow. The descendants of these overly backward and religious people now loom large among the “red state” voters who have been so important in recent national elections. Jewish animosity toward the Christian culture that is so deeply ingrained in much of America is legendary. As Joel Kotkin points out, “for generations, [American] Jews have viewed religious conservatives with a combination of fear and disdain.” And as Elliott Abrams notes, the American Jewish community “clings to what is at bottom a dark vision of America, as a land permeated with anti-Semitism and always on the verge of anti-Semitic outbursts.”

These attitudes are well captured in Steven Steinlight’s charge that the Americans who approved the immigration restriction legislation of the 1920s—the vast majority of the population—were a “thoughtless mob” and that the legislation itself was “evil, xenophobic, anti-Semitic,” “vilely discriminatory,” a “vast moral failure,” a “monstrous policy.” In the end, the dark view of traditional Slavs and their culture that facilitated the participation of so many Eastern European shtetl Jews in becoming willing executioners in the name of international socialism is not very different from the views of contemporary American Jews about a majority of their fellow countrymen.

There is a certain enormity in all this. The twentieth century was indeed the Jewish century because Jews and Jewish organizations were intimately and decisively involved in its most important events. Slezkine’s greatest accomplishment is to set the historical record straight on the importance of Jews in the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath, but he doesn’t focus on the huge repercussions of the Revolution, repercussions that continue to shape the world of the twenty-ﬁrst century. In fact, for long after the Revolution, conservatives throughout Europe and the United States believed that Jews were responsible for Communism and for the Bolshevik Revolution. The Jewish role in leftist political movements was a common source of anti-Jewish attitudes among a great many intellectuals and political ﬁgures.

In Germany, the identiﬁcation of Jews and Bolshevism was widespread in the middle classes and was a critical part of the National Socialist view of the world. As historian Ernst Nolte has noted, for middle-class Germans, “the experience of the Bolshevik revolution in Germany was so immediate, so close to home, and so disquieting, and statistics seemed to prove the overwhelming participation of Jewish ringleaders so irrefutably,” that even many liberals believed in Jewish responsibility.

Jewish involvement in the horrors of Communism was also an important sentiment in Hitler’s desire to destroy the USSR and in the anti-Jewish actions of the German National Socialist government. Jews and Jewish organizations were also important forces in inducing the Western democracies to side with Stalin rather than Hitler in World War II.

The victory over National Socialism set the stage for the tremendous increase in Jewish power in the post-World War II Western world, in the end more than compensating for the decline of Jews in the Soviet Union. As Slezkine shows, the children of Jewish immigrants assumed an elite position in the United States, just as they had in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe and Germany prior to World War II. This new-found power facilitated the establishment of Israel, the transformation of the United States and other Western nations in the direction of multiracial, multicultural societies via large-scale non-white immigration, and the consequent decline in European demographic and cultural preeminence. The critical Jewish role in Communism has been sanitized, while Jewish victimization by the Nazis has achieved the status of a moral touchstone and is a prime weapon in the push for massive non-European immigration, multiculturalism, and advancing other Jewish causes.

The Jewish involvement in Bolshevism has therefore had an enormous effect on recent European and American history. It is certainly true that Jews would have attained elite status in the United States with or without their prominence in the Soviet Union. However, without the Soviet Union as a shining beacon of a land freed of ofﬁcial anti-Semitism where Jews had attained elite status in a stunningly short period, the history of the United States would have been very different. The persistence of Jewish radicalism inﬂuenced the general political sensibility of the Jewish community and had a destabilizing effect on American society, ranging from the paranoia of the McCarthy era, to the triumph of the 1960s countercultural revolution, to the conﬂicts over immigration and multiculturalism that are so much a part of the contemporary political landscape.

It is Slezkine’s chief contention that the history of the twentieth century was a history of the rise of the Jews in the West, in the Middle East, and in Russia, and ultimately their decline in Russia. I think he is absolutely right about this. If there is any lesson to be learned, it is that Jews not only became an elite in all these areas, they became a hostile elite—hostile to traditional peoples and cultures of all three areas they came to dominate. Until now, the greatest human tragedies have occurred in the Soviet Union, but Israel’s record as an oppressive and expansive occupying power in the Middle East has made it a pariah among the vast majority of the governments of the world. And Jewish hostility toward the European-derived people and culture of the United States has been a consistent feature of Jewish political behavior and attitudes throughout the twentieth century. In the present, this normative Jewish hostility toward the traditional population and culture of the United States remains a potent motivator of Jewish involvement in the transformation of the U.S. into a non-European society.

Given this record of Jews as a hostile but very successful elite, I doubt that the continued demographic and cultural dominance of Western European peoples will be retained either in Europe or the United States and other Western societies without a decline in Jewish inﬂuence. The lesson of the Soviet Union (and Spain from the ﬁfteenth to seventeenth centuries) is that Jewish inﬂuence does wax and wane. Unlike the attitudes of the utopian ideologies of the twentieth century, there is no end to history.

___________

In another entry I will deal with the “second reason” why every decent person should become an anti-Semite: the Jewish role in shaping American immigration policies.

Tags Jewish question (JQ), Russia

Kevin MacDonald

A gentile baron

under the spell of the Jew

Just as mainstream newspapers would immediately fire anyone who dares even to hint that there’s such a thing as a Jewish Question, many bloggers, even those who vehemently “defend” the West, are clueless about the JQ.

On February 28 of the last year Baron Bodissey, the administrator of the counter-jihad blogsite Gates of Vienna, responded to an e-mail communicating me that he would not be publishing the rest of my online book The Return of Quetzalcoatl in his site. Bodissey wrote:

My problem comes from the turn your blog has taken. Not only have you yourself, with your “lightning strike” moment, decided that there is a “Jewish problem”, but you have also welcomed comments from real National Socialists—people who want to continue the work of the Third Reich, especially as regards the Jews and other “inferior” races… I can’t help but take into consideration the trouble it would cause for me to associate myself with people who openly advocate the extermination of the Jews.

I have worked hard in recent months to establish some lines of communication with people in Israel. Despite how worthwhile your chapters are, I won’t risk throwing all that away to publish them.

–Baron B.

I was flabbergasted. None of the commenters who Bodissey referred to in my “lightening strike” thread advocate exterminating the Jews, not even the one who in that thread openly identified himself with National Socialism. Nor have they said that the Jews are “an inferior race.”

Bodissey’s was the proverbial reaction we hear thousands of times from those who have been bewitched by the elites every time any of us dares to name what must never be named: the members of the ethnic group who control the media, large parts of the financial sector and are influential in the academia.

I was disappointed that the rest of The Return of Quetzalcoatl would have to be published in my own blog instead of reaching a wider audience—again, what happens in the large newspapers when one dares to name the Jew. That day after several exchanges with Bodissey I realized that, in spite of the fact that Bodissey claims to be an intellectual, he had no idea whatsoever of what we meant when we talk about the “problem.” Bodissey again:

Based on my own personal experience—personal, mind you; people I actually know—the characterization that there is a “Jewish problem” simply isn’t true. I see more of a “Swedish problem” than I do a “Jewish problem”.

Although this month I added five rather modest entries in this blog on Jew-blind counter-jihad (two of them inspired me to chose the above image), I am no expert on the question of how Jewish influence has been detrimental to Western civilization. However, the interested reader may listen Professor Kevin MacDonald’s conference at the seminar “Revolt Against Civilization” hosted by the Danish Society for Free Historical Research in Denmark last month:

Jewish Intellectual Movements
in the 20th Century:

• Part 1/6

• Part 2/6

• Part 3/6

• Part 4/6

• Part 5/6

• Part 6/6

The honest listener will see if, following Bodissey’s remarks last year, I suddenly “decided” (his word) that there’s a Jewish problem or if the problem really does exist outside my head.

Tags Jewish question (JQ)

Conservatism

Why have we so miserably failed?

Post author By C .T.
Post date June 23, 2011
2 Comments on Why have we so miserably failed?

At The Occidental Observer (TOO) Matt Parrott has reviewed favorably Greg Johnson’s first book. Below I picked up one of Trainspotter’s recent comments in an ongoing discussion at TOO:

It’s easy for whites living in our current Dark Age to forget just how much pro-white activism there has been since World War II. We had the Dixiecrats back in 1948 who managed to carry any number of states. We had massive resistance, George Wallace (who also carried multiple states), widespread Citizen’s Councils, etc.

Point is, a lot of people did a lot of work, at least purportedly on behalf of whites, and all of it came to precisely, exactly nothing. Zilch. Nada. Zero.

Phenomenal amounts of energy, and a not inconsequential amount of money, entirely wasted. This at a time when whites still had a few friends in high places.

Now we survey the wreckage, and anti-whites are in control of every single institution of any importance in the entire country. Not one holder of major office in the entire nation will acknowledge so much as our right to exist as a people. Not one.

But the damage is not just apparent in terms of distant, insular “institutions.” All one has to do is walk outside his front door to witness the destruction of our people. It’s pitiful.

The failures of the past must not be repeated. We are now running out of time, and this is leading to a paradox. On the one hand, it is frustrating to many people (and understandably so) that much of what they are seeing is “just” intellectual foundational work. On the other hand, the past speaks to us clearly: without that foundational work, even massive movements go precisely nowhere.

The earlier movements all failed because they were essentially conservative. They didn’t think in terms of a white homeland, in which our people would control all institutions, all levers of power, thereby be able to control our own destiny. Instead, they accepted as a given a land in which Jews increasingly commanded the heights of power, with plenty of non-whites to provide votes and muscle. Yet somehow they imagined that their enemies would just leave them alone. Amazing. Yeah, those that despise us, those that have every interest to work against us—let’s accept them as fellow citizens and hope they’ll suddenly decide to leave us alone. Good luck with that.

In our own day, we see this happening as well, though not with an explicitly pro-white group. Of course I speak of the Tea Party. Lacking a coherent worldview and clear loyalties, the Tea Partiers have been easy marks for misdirection, subversion and neutralizing. The Tea Party types are fine with non-whites, as long as they are “legal.” In other words, they are fine with the country continuing to fill with the very types of people who… wait for it… oppose the Tea Party. Mestizos and blacks (and most other non-white groups, for that matter) support fully funded government programs and government spending, and they aren’t terribly interested in protecting the crusty old “rights” of whites. They don’t give a fig about the debt, as long as they are disproportionately benefiting from government spending.

But sure, let the country continue to fill up with them. Let the ballot box continue to be demographically stuffed. Never acknowledge that we are a particular people with particular interests. Just accept the status quo which is completely stacked against you, but somehow you expect to win, despite all historical evidence to the contrary. It is to laugh.

This thread is itself a testament to our desperate need for a solid foundation. Even on TOO, we see commenters with loyalties and worldviews all over the place. Some seem to have more, or at least as much loyalty to the free market as to our own people (I say this as a former libertarian, in love as I was with an idea).

That’s a terrible mistake. It is likely true that the future white homeland will have a fairly free market, for the simple reason that an honest market based on legitimate productivity and wealth creation is probably best for our particular people—white people. We can handle a good deal of freedom, and as a people we have a lot of creativity that freedom tends to unleash. But we should always remember that our people come first. The market is not loyal to our people, and we owe no loyalty to it. We will have a free market exactly and precisely up to the point where it is conducive for our people’s long term survival. Not more than that out of some misguided affection for something that has zero love for you. Unrequited love is a bitch, and we’ve got to stop indulging in it.

This same basic approach applies to other sources of conflicting loyalties noted here. For example, it is probably true that the future white homeland(s) —hopefully including all of our ancient homelands as well— will in many ways be “conservative,” especially in the sense of promoting values and virtues consistent with stable families and keeping the collective cradle full. But conservatism itself will not win us our lands back, and we owe no loyalty to it per se. We should be “conservative” precisely up to the point where it benefits our people, and not a whit more. Same thing with liberalism, or any other “ism” that is rattling around in the fevered imaginations of those who love an idea more than their own people.

Point is, so-called white nationalists are still all over the place in terms of their loyalties. They fetishize markets, they worship false gods.

___________________

Note:

On this very issue, in that thread Greg Johnson linked to a couple of his articles that are must reading (here and here).

Liberalism

The liberal axiom

Today that I translated the below piece to Spanish a sentence caught my attention:

“Instead of opposing non-discrimination, [conservatives] oppose multiculturalism and political correctness. But let’s say that we got rid of multiculturalism and political correctness. Would that end… immigration? No. Multiculturalism is not the source of… immigration.”

Auster adds that the source of it is modern man’s blind belief in the Non-Discriminatory Principle, the liberal axiom.

The following is only a part of the 2009 speech, “A Real Islam Policy for a Real America,” that would be published in a book. In the speech Auster said (brown bold-type is mine):

To deal with the crisis facing our civilization, we must be both realistic and imaginative. The realism part consists in recognizing how bad our situation is.

The entire Western world is at present under the grip of the modern liberal ideology that targets every normal and familiar aspect of human life, and our entire historical way of being as a society.

The key to this liberal ideology is the belief in tolerance or non-discrimination as the ruling principle of society, the principle to which all other principles must yield. We see this belief at work in every area of modern life.

The principle of non-discrimination must, if followed consistently, destroy every human society and institution. A society that cannot discriminate between itself and other societies will go out of existence, just as an elm tree that cannot discriminate between itself and a linden tree must go out of existence. To be, we must be able to say that we are us, which means that we are different from others. If we are not allowed to distinguish between ourselves and Muslims, if we must open ourselves to everyone and everything in the world that is different from us, and if the more different and threatening the Other is, the more we must open ourselves to it, then we go out of existence.

This liberal principle of destruction is utterly simple and radically extreme. Yet very, very few people, even self-described hard-line conservatives, are aware of this principle and the hold it has over our society. Instead of opposing non-discrimination, they oppose multiculturalism and political correctness. But let’s say that we got rid of multiculturalism and political correctness. Would that end Muslim immigration? No. Multiculturalism is not the source of Muslim immigration. The source of it is our belief that we must not discriminate against other people on the basis of their culture, their ethnicity, their nationality, their religion. This is the idea of the 1965 Immigration Act, which was the idea of the 1964 Civil Rights Act applied to all of humanity: all discrimination is wrong, period. No one in today’s society, including conservatives, feels comfortable identifying this utterly simple idea, because that would mean opposing it.

To see how powerful the belief in non-discrimination is, consider this: Prior to World War II, would any Western country have considered admitting significant numbers of Muslim immigrants? Of course not; it would have been out of the question. The West had a concrete identity. It saw itself as white and in large part as Christian, and there was still active in the Western mind the knowledge that Islam was our historic adversary, as it has been for a thousand years, and radically alien. But today, the very notion of stopping Muslim immigration is out of the question, it can’t even be thought.

What would have been inconceivable 70 or 80 years ago is unquestionable today. A society that 70 years ago wouldn’t have dreamed of admitting large numbers of Muslims, today doesn’t dream of reducing, let alone stopping, the immigration of Muslims. Even the most impassioned anti-Islamic Cassandras never question—indeed they never even mention—the immigration of Muslims, or say it should be reduced or stopped.

You don’t need to know any more than what I’ve just said. The rule of non-discrimination, in all its destructive potentialities, is shown in this amazing fact, that the writers and activists who constantly cry that Islam as a mortal danger to our society will not say that we ought to stop or even reduce Muslim immigration. Such is the liberal belief which says that the most morally wrong thing is for people to have a critical view of a foreign group, to want to exclude that group or keep it out.

The dilemma suggests the solution. What is now unthinkable, must become thinkable; what is now unsayable, must become sayable; and ultimately it must replace non-discrimination as the ruling belief in society. I know that this sounds crazy, utterly impossible. But fifty or a hundred years ago it would have seemed crazy, utterly impossible, that today’s liberalism with its suicidal ideology would have replaced the traditional attitudes that were then prevalent. If society could change that radically in one direction, toward suicidal liberalism, it can change back again. It’s not impossible.

In the same way, modern liberalism says that it is evil to believe that some people are more unlike us than others, because that would also be a violation of the liberal principle that all people are equally like us. The equality principle of modern liberalism says that unassimilable immigrants must be permitted to flood our society, changing its very nature.

This is the ubiquitous yet unacknowledged horror of modern liberalism, that it takes the ordinary, differentiated nature of the world, which all human beings have always recognized, and makes it impossible for people to discuss it, because under liberalism anyone who notes these distinctions and says that they matter has done an evil thing and must be banished from society, or at least be barred from a mainstream career.

This liberalism is the most radical and destructive ideology that has ever been, and yet it is not questioned. Communism and big government liberalism were challenged and fought in the past. But the ideology of non-discrimination, which came about after World War II, has never been resisted—it has never even been identified, even though it is everywhere. What is needed, if the West is to survive, is a pro-Western civilization movement that criticizes, resists, and reverses this totalistic liberal belief system that controls our world.

[See my corollary to this post: here]

Savitri Devi Third Reich

Why Hitlerism should be our new religion

Post author By C .T.
Post date June 14, 2011
5 Comments on Why Hitlerism should be our new religion

The recent blog wars of nationalists vs. counter-jihadists was so engrossing that I interrupted the reading of a piece by Savitri Devi (photo below), “The Religion of the Strong” that reminded me a Counter-Currents featured article by William Pierce, republished also in this blog under the title “God and White Nationalism.”

Finally, today I had a little time to finish my reading. Devi wrote (no ellipsis added between unquoted excerpts):

You who exalt the image of the solitary rock, free yourself from two deadly superstitions: the search for “happiness” and concern for “humanity”.

Attach yourself to the essential—to the eternal. And never worry about happiness. He who has the Word, father of thought, and who, far from putting it in service of the essential, wastes it in the search for personal satisfactions, he is not Strong; he is not an aristocrat in the deep sense of the word, but petty, an egoist and a coward, an object of disgust in the eyes of the natural élite.

All society, all “civilization” is marked by the seal of the Powers of Decadence, a civilization of the Dark Age. If you are obliged to suffer it, suffer it by unceasingly opposing it, denouncing it, combating it every minute of your life.

It is, however, true that—beyond a certain degree of mixing of races and cultures and conditioning on a vast scale, thanks to all the modern means of communication—people end up resembling each other strangely, psychically if not physically, a uniformity of grayness, a kind of manufactured homogeneity—desired by those who control the masses; a uniformity which reveals only the deterioration of a society that has definitively turned its back on the eternal—in other words: a damned society.

But one can still sometimes discover an exceptional individual within such a society, an individual who disdains the ethnic chaos that he sees around him and of which he is perhaps himself a product.

As for the enemy, fight him with all the ardor of your heart. It is not necessary to hate him. He follows his nature and achieves his destiny while being opposed to the eternal values. Fight him, and by all means, without respite and weakness. For he is your absolute opposite.

Any true religion is a path open to those who tend towards the eternal, consciously or not. And there is no true religion without ritual.

One almost can define a decadent age simply by saying that it is an age when traditional doctrines, that is to say, those that raise the faithful to the contemplation of the eternal, cease to interest men, except for a negligible minority.

In order for a Weltanschauung, a vision of the Universe, a “philosophy,” once infused with the magic of ritual, to become the basis of a true religion, it is necessary not only that it contain no internal contradictions, but also that its fundamental propositions are true, not relatively but absolutely.

A false religion in our age, the case with Marxism, adopted by Lenin as the foundation of the proletarian State, is based on flagrant untruths: on the assertion that man is nothing more than what his economic milieu makes of him; on the negation of the role of heredity, therefore of race; on the negation of the role of superior personalities.

Among the doctrines of the twentieth century called political, I know of only one that meets the condition sine qua non to be used as the basis of a true religion, namely, that it rests on eternal truths. Only one, I say, and I speak of the true Aryan racism, in other words, Hitlerism.

In a passage of his novel The Seven Colors, Robert Brasillach describes the consecration ceremony for the new flags of the Third Reich at one of the great annual meetings at Nuremberg, at which he himself was present. After the imposing procession of all the organizations dependent upon or attached to the National Socialist Party, the Führer solemnly advanced under the eyes of five hundred thousand spectators crowded on the steps of the immense stadium, on which reigned an absolute silence. One after another, he raised the new banners and put them in contact with the “Blood Flag”: the standard that his earliest disciples had carried during the Putsch of 9 November 1923 and to which the blood of the Sixteen who fell this day had given a sacred character. In this way, each flag became similar to that one; “charged” like it with a mystical fluid by participation in the sacrifice of the Sixteen. And the French writer remarks, quite justly, that he whom the religious meaning of this act escapes “does not understand anything of Hitlerism.” He emphasizes, in other words, that this act is a ritual.

But this ritual, to which many others can be added, would never have sufficed to give Hitlerism the character of a religion, if it had not already been a more-than-political doctrine: a Weltanschauung. And above all, it would have been unable to make it a true religion, if, at the base of this Weltanschauung, there had not been eternal truths and a whole attitude which was not (and does not remain), in last analysis, anything other than the quest for the eternal even in what changes—the traditional attitude par excellence.

These words may seem strange in 1969, more than twenty-four years after the defeat of Hitler’s Germany on the battlefield and the collapse of its political structure. They can seem strange, now that one would seek in vain, in the whole geographical region covered by the Third Reich, a visible sign of the resurgence of National Socialism such as the Führer intended it, and that the majority of the organizations which, beyond the old frontiers of the Reich, claim they would rescue the condemned Movement, are just pale imitations without heart, or just lamentable caricatures.

It is correct that Hitlerians had been vanquished on all fronts in 1945; it is correct that the Third German Reich was dismembered; that the National Socialist party does not exist anymore; that in Germany and elsewhere there are no more Swastika flags in the windows, no streets bearing the name of the Führer, no publications of any kind that honor his memory. It is correct that thousands of Germans learned how to scorn or hate He whom their parents had acclaimed, and that millions are no more interested in him and his teaching than if he had never lived. Yet it remains no less true that the essence of the Hitlerian doctrine is the very expression of eternal laws; the laws that govern not only man, but life; which represent, as I wrote in a book in the German language, “the wisdom of the starry heaven,” and that the choice posed to the world is, consequently, the same after 1945 as before. It is the acceptance of this more than human wisdom, it is this accord with the spirit of the Nature, which Hitlerism implies, or disintegration, ethnic chaos, the degeneration of man—separation from the Heart of the cosmos; damnation. It is—and the words are again mine—“Hitler or hell.”

People of our planet seem to have chosen hell. It is what a declining humanity invariably does. It is the very sign that we are completely in what the Hindu tradition calls the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age.

But the ages follow one another. The laws that regulate their succession remain.

A doctrine like Hitlerism, whose spirit and application in this world can only go against the current of our time [contrasts with] the religions “of extinction,” as I call them—such as Buddhism, Jainism, and later Catharism—guide the lost and the desperate for whom the absence of hope is suffering, people broken or rejected by the fight without end and who aspire to “leave it.” The doctrines that preach action in detachment and enthusiasm without hope are addressed to the Strong.

Hitlerism considered in its essence, i.e., stripped of all that attaches it to the political and economic contingencies of a particular time, is the religion of the Strong of the Aryan race, as opposed to a world in decline; a world of ethnic chaos.

When will one see in Germany monuments, if not “temples,” to the glory of all those Germans hung from 6 October 1946 and after, up to 7 June 1951, for having been faithful to their faith, which is also ours, and having done their duty?

The Führer said to each of his compatriots: “You are nothing; your people is all.” Only he who is of Germanic blood can be a member of the (German) people. From whence it follows that no Jew can be a citizen of the (German) State”

It is a return, pure and simple, to the ancient conception of the people: of the German conception, certainly, but also the Greek, that of the Romans before the Empire, with that of all peoples, or almost all. It is the negation of the Roman attitude of the centuries of decadence, which allowed any inhabitant of the Empire, any subject of the Emperor, to become a “Roman citizen,” be he Jewish, like Paul of Tarsus or Flavius Josephus, or Arab, like the Emperor Philip—and, later, it sufficed to be “Christian,” and of the same Church as the Emperor to be an Byzantine “citizen,” able to reach the highest offices. It is the negation of the ideas of the “people” and the “citizen” such as presented by the French Revolution at the moment when, at the suggestion of the Abbé Grégoire and others as well, the Constituent Assembly proclaimed “French” all the Jews residing in France and speaking French.

In other words, if a people is an historical and social reality, if its common memories, glorious and painful, common habits and, in general, common language, are factors of cohesion among its members, it is also more than that. It is part of a great race. It is an Aryan or Mongoloid people, an Australoid, Negro, or Semitic people. It can, without ceasing to be a true people, contain a more or less large proportion of different sub-races, provided that these are all part of the great race to which it belongs. (The Führer himself was physically as “Alpine” as he was Nordic, and perhaps more. The brilliant and faithful Goebbels was almost purely Mediterranean. And they are not the only greater Germans or the only personages in the first rank of the Third Reich not to be one hundred percent Nordic.)

If one admits, as I would readily, that “the Divine sleeps in the stone, wakes up in the plant, feels in the animal, and thinks in the man” Hitlerism represents, in the midst of ethnic chaos, in the midst of an epoch of the world’s physical and moral decline, the supreme effort to bring the thinking Aryan back to respect for the cosmic order as it is affirmed in the laws of development.

_______________

My two cents:

But how could Hitlerism be our new religion in the West’s darkest hour? Tip: focus Northwest.

Tags Adolf Hitler, National Socialism

“…then you are in sad shape”

Post author By C .T.
Post date June 13, 2011
5 Comments on “…then you are in sad shape”

Perhaps those who have been following my little trilogy (here, here and here) may be interested in the intelligent comments by Daybreaker today at Age of Treason about the recent incident at the counter-jihad site Gates of Vienna.

Daybreaker wrote:

I wasn’t participating in the conversation, but I read both threads, and… the impression I got was that The Sentinel was telling the truth and he never received a satisfactory reply.

The polite dissidents Tanstaafl and Chechar did well, and team Takuan Seiyo came off as nasty and shameless in exploiting the fact that the Gates of Vienna can’t afford to be seen countenancing anti-Jewish opinions…

I found the threads enlightening. I hadn’t realized the anti-jihadists were that weak. In the face of a few reasons why a list of six hostile groups [the six-point list appears: here] should have been a list of seven hostile groups (which is surely on-topic), they were quickly reduced to abuse, bluster and the ever-popular “shut up.”

Nobody thinks Jews are the only problem, including Kevin MacDonald, who has written eloquently on the self-destructiveness of typically White universalism and “altruistic punishment” carried beyond reasonable bounds. Fertility is a problem for advanced societies, even the Japanese, who nobody thinks are responding to Jewish pressure not to have kids. Feminism can create severe problems independently of Judaism. Political correctness and the sort of one-sided liberal philosophy that sees autonomy as the supreme good rather than one item in a basket of goods are real menaces. “Black Run America” may be an exaggerated label, but there are plenty of White people who are experiencing problems along those lines, in cities where the political machine has gone Black, and “Black Run Southern Africa” is a brutal reality. Islam is still there and still a menace, and any European would be a fool to ignore it, if only because it’s the religion of Arab ethnic supremacism and thus at least dubious for White people. And so on.

So it’s not only Jews that get blamed.

Rather it’s only Jews that demand that they be above blame, and that will attack to the point of derailing threads repeatedly unless they are set above the ordinary standards of criticism that are applied to everyone else. If there’s a list of six or seven items, and all of them blame somebody, count on the ones that blame White men to go through without any objection from anyone, and most of the other items to go through with varying minor degrees of objection, but don’t be surprised when the one that mentions Jews ignites a lasting firestorm of verbal punishment. The whole thread gets derailed, over and over, so that the only way to get relief is either to establish some explicitly non-Jewish discussion space (which I guess institutions like the Catholic Church have done, historically), or else ban, demonize, marginalize and discourage whoever refuses to let Jews play by special rules that advantage them over everyone else.

And then comes the amazing claim that it’s the Judeo-skeptics who have one-track minds. [e.g., here]

***

Anti-jihadism, with Jews seen as an indispensable part of the coalition (that is, with the power of veto) cannot transcend this problem. At least, it obviously hasn’t. If the Jews are indispensable, and it’s unacceptable (or at least too wearing on the nerves of relatively conflict-averse Whites) to have the fights that Jews will start whenever they aren’t privileged enough, then everybody and everything displeasing to Jews has to go.

Then anti-jihadism must become in time, a Jewish front, in effect. It will take on jihadism and mass immigration only as and when that suits Jews. If Jews don’t think ending mass immigration in general should be part of the program, it won’t be, even if that would be the only principled and practicable way to keep Islamic hordes out of White countries.

In time an anti-jihadist front may even include other items that aren’t logically connected with protecting Whites from jihad at all, because Jews and crypto-Jews can’t be kicked off the team (because they’re the ones with the money and connections), and they’ll make life unbearable for everyone else until they get their way.

Anti-jihadism as a coalition including Jews and Whites is hollow. It can’t defend itself in straight up intellectual terms, as seen in these Gates of Vienna threads.

And in the long term it won’t defend White interests. It’s a “coalition” that only exists while one side has the money and sets the rules and gets what it wants (or else), and the other side supplies warm bodies and labors on despite the fact that its needs are not being met, in frustration over lack of alternatives and in the vain hope that things will somehow get better.

This has been the Jewish ethno-political style for century after century, for millennium after millennium, in different states, on different continents, and in dealing with vastly dissimilar groups of Whites.

It’s not profitable for Whites, collectively and in the long run, to enter coalitions on these terms.

***

Fjordman [wrote]:

“The simple fact is that when it comes to giving birth to the Proposition Nation, which was the subject of my original essay, Jews were quite irrelevant.”

The simple fact is that that was not a “simple fact” but an assumption that was bound to be controversial, given that Jews have been highly relevant to issues of immigration, “pluralism” and so on in White countries.

Fjordman should have anticipated that inevitable controversy. He could have given reasons for his assumption. (It is entirely unsupported in his post.) Or he could have said (in the original post) that he wasn’t ready to discuss the Jewish issue and asked people to confine discussion to other aspects of his new thinking, where he was ready to respond. (I’m sure someone would have asked why he wasn’t ready to respond to such an obvious problem. But if he had stuck to saying that he needed a discussion on other aspects of the proposition nation as he had described it, I think Tanstaafl for one would have respected that.) Or he could have asked that his sixth point be taken as covering the Jewish issue for the time being, and requested that those commenting try to address all six points evenly, not just one.

What he did was pretend, with an unsupported controversial assumption, that no problem exists, and then when this odd move was questioned he supported rhetorical hostilities including exclusion for those puzzled by his assumption.

In effect, he hijacked his own thread by managing it badly. And he took no responsibility for this.

If things had gone down as Fjordman said, I would feel sorry for him. But as Mary points out, you can line up what he said Chechar confessed to with what Chechar said, and it’s obvious that Fjordman is making serious misstatements about things in our plain sight, and worse, using these invented facts to justify a lot of discourteous behavior by himself and others.

That creates a pathetic impression. When you can’t respond to reasonable requests such as those from The Sentinel with reasons, not abuse, when you can’t defend your thesis and in effect you need abusive rhetoric from yourself and others as a way to justify lowering the curtain on a discussion where you are not coming off well intellectually, and when you need to misstate the very plainly stated opinions of those who dissent in order to justify this rhetorical abuse and this silencing, then you are in sad shape.

Tags Jewish question (JQ)

Conservatism Islamization of Europe

Against traitorous Counter-jihad

Post author By C .T.
Post date June 12, 2011
6 Comments on Against traitorous Counter-jihad

As the last entry of tonight’s trilogy, I would like to repost what another commenter said at Age of Treason:

Armor said…

Tanstaafl: “The soi-disant counter-jihad has several characteristics of a jewish movement, and can be seen as largely an outgrowth of and having much overlap with both zionism and neoconservatism.”

What is very Jewish in counter-jihad is that everything is turned upside down. It is full of accusatory inversion. The Jewish counter-jihadists blame the Muslims for misdeeds that are more characteristic of Jews than of Muslims.

• Counter-jihadists blame the Muslims for hating the West. In fact, Jewish activists are the ones who are busy destroying the West through mass immigration.

• They say that the Koran is uncivilized, but the Talmud is probably worse.

• They say there is no moderate islam. I wonder where are the moderate Jewish activists!

• [Ned May’s] Gates of Vienna is currently advertising for a book called Allah is Dead: Why Islam is not a religion by Rebecca Bynum. In fact, Christianity has much more in common with Islam than with Judaism. If Judaism is for ethnic Jews only, is there a different God for non-Jews? Do non-Jews have souls? Is there life after death? Don’t look for the answers in Wikipedia. The entry about Judaism is full of obfuscation.

• They say that the Muslims are threatening free speech. The affair of the Danish cartoons is an example of that. But free speech in the West is mostly attacked by Jewish groups, not by Muslims.

• They say that teachers in France are afraid to teach Muslim students about “the Holocaust”. But Jews forbid Europeans to discuss the subject.

• They say the Muslims are obscurantists stuck in the Middle Ages. But at least, Muslims don’t have any cultural influence in White people’s lives. By contrast, Jews have subverted Western public intellectual life and largely destroyed it.

• They complain about taqiyya. What about kol nidre?

• They taunt the Europeans who are said to have become dhimmis to the Muslims. The truth is that we have become dhimmis to the Jews.

• They warn against weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East, but Israel is the only one with a nuclear arsenal.

• They worry about the lack of democracy in the Arab world, but don’t care about the plight of Arabs in Israel.

And so on…

Lord of the Rings

Beware of Wormtongue!

Or Against Takuan Seiyo

Still further to my previous entry in which I mentioned Tanstaafl’s essay “White Nationalism and Counter-Jihad”. Rosalie intervened at the Gates of Vienna (GoV) thread and her portrait of a half-Slav/half-Jew who in the blogosphere very misleadingly uses the penname of Takuan Seiyo (and who reminds me LOTR’s character Wormtongue) merits an entry on its own. At the blogsite Age of Treason,

Rosalie said…

For me, it defies reason why a bully and intellectual terrorist like Takuan Seiyo is considered respectable, accepted and praised in the counter-jihad community—and in any group of decent people. Compared to Seiyo, Larry Auster [about Auster cf. e.g., here] almost looks like the Good Samaritan.

Every time I read one of his comments online, I feel the need to intervene because my head almost explodes with anger seeing so much dishonesty, cunningness and obfuscation. Basically, everything he’s ever written might be summed up as “Whites everywhere feel the need to pay for pogroms, the Cossacks and Auschwitz with their suicide—and don’t even think about surviving until you uproot this evil from your hearts and minds”. Each and every of his essays or comments starts with a few sugarcoated paragraphs about the necessity to save the Western civilization, and then he comes back to the main point: don’t forget the pogroms, the Cossacks, Auschwitz.

It’s not only the transparent cunningness that makes my head explode—but also the unmatched Judaic thirst of revenge. Pretending that you want to save the Western civilization while reminding Europeans incessantly their tradition of “psychotic anti-Semitism” (the most painful issue for whites, the Holocaust guilt) is like pretending to help a drug-addict in recovery while admonishing him all the time “and never forget what a junkie you used to be: and you are a potential junkie for the rest of your life”. I prefer any time of the day a honest enemy to a destructive fake friend like this.

Seiyo makes me understand the mentality of the Jewish Soviet commissars and why Jews are capable to hijack any movement where they are accepted, from the Politburo to the Republican Party, at the expense of naive Gentiles, otherwise at least as capable of leadership as them. The virulence, hypnotic verbosity (talk as much as possible, never address the point), the fervor in silencing the opponents misrepresenting their arguments, character assassination as the main tool to stop the debate, sentimental blackmail and whining (“my parents, who survived the Holocaust”), etc. — all these aspects make me understand the mindset of many, from Trotsky to Alinsky, from Horkheimer to Bernard-Henri Levy.

Last but not least, it makes me understand the troubled Jewish-Gentile relations, in a nutshell. I don’t exclude the possibility that deep inside, at a subconscious level, intelligent, articulate Gentiles like Fjordman or the Baron [GoV’s admin] might simply be afraid of the bully and others like him. Not consciously, but as a suppressed reaction of protection.

@ Fjordman, the Baron, and others with Jekyll/Hyde “friends” like Seiyo.

Jekyll/Hyde is an apt characterization. You can notice his attitude towards me in the GoV thread. In the beginning he’s very friendly, with an almost father-like attitude. Then, when he realizes what I’m saying and that he can’t beat me with arguments, the wrath comes over my head: “I’ve believed that you might be saved, but it seems that I’m mistaken”. Notice how finally he placed me in the category of the unredeemable—the “Nazis”.

I can go on and on about his dishonest tactics and strategies. For example, when you respond to one of his posts and he’s unable to answer back with arguments, he disappears for a short while, then he’s back with a long diatribe against you consisting mainly in the accusation that you see “a Jew under every bed”, plus a panegyric praising the Jewish contributions to the Western civilization, plus a lachrymose eulogy dedicated to the victims of the pogroms and Auschwitz, like you’re personally responsible for them. Thus, the people who participate in the conversation don’t even know how all this started (he ducked out from the original conversation), and the impression that remains is that you’re a paranoid anti-Semite who blames Jews for all the ills of the world…

Jesus, expecting honesty and moral spine from these people is like expecting the Second Coming. Seiyo often claims that the main obstacle to save the West is the fact that paranoid anti-Semites are still around: they are the only reason the battle is lost before starting. The irony is, it’s exactly people like Auster and Seiyo that make any pro-Western movement impossible—and there are thousands like them. As long as we don’t have the strength to tell them, as a group, Get The Fuck Out (it’s as simple as that), we’re dead.

Tags Jewish question (JQ)

Lord of the Rings

Théoden or Denethor?

Or Against Fjordman III

Further to my recent entry about the notable counter-jihadist who blogs under the penname of “Fjordman.”

After my comments of my previous entry, also posted by me in Ned May’s blogsite Gates of Vienna (GoV), Fjordman reacted with unexpected hostility. But he didn’t address any of our points. A commenter who had been a fan of Fjordman’s previous writings replied to Fjordman: “You have not addressed one single point raised by the two commentators you lambast as ‘dishonest debaters’ — instead you embark upon a lengthy ad hom diatribe.”

The other commenter insulted by Fjordman was Tanstaafl. In his own blog, Tanstaafl’s comprehensive reply to Fjordman’s diatribe is so good that here I will limit myself to quote just a few of the comments of Tanstaafl’s essay “White Nationalism and Counter-Jihad”.

In the blogsite Age of Treason—:

Cicatrizatic said…

I think you [Tanstaafl] nailed it. He’s [Fjordman] too intellectually dishonest to reason through the Jewish question—he’s chosen to side with the Jews. Your comments make him uncomfortable, so he just pronounces that you are no longer welcome. A pitiful and cowardly response. Once bloggers side with the Jews, they adopt Jewish tactics, i.e., authoritarian control of “dialogue,” ad hominem attacks, extreme accusations, etc.

Mary said…

You are a good and decent person Tan, and I appreciate greatly the compassion and understanding you have extended to Fjordman given the shocking way he has just attacked you (and Chechar). I pray the day comes when he will thank you for said compassion and patience, and apologize for speaking to and about you in such a truly shameful fashion. It was such a “beta-style” rant, that I find myself having to craft an entirely new image of the man!

I mean come on! To accuse you—you being one of the most intelligent and honest writers in the blogosphere—of having a “low IQ”…

I mean, is the man looking for a career in stand-up comedy or something? I think you are bang on the money; he has come up against a most difficult inner hurdle, and as he could not bear to be challenged in the very public spotlight of the comments section at GoV he instead lashed out at you and made you “disappear.” I bet he will be seeing you under the bed and around corners from here on in, the poor bastard 😉

Brandon said…

You pushed his what I call “guilty button”. His reaction shows it. They who suppress the truth within themselves always do this when someone comes speaking truth. You got too close to the truth and they who are guilty of believing the lie can’t stand that.

Scott said…

I don’t share the confidence that guys like Fjordman will ever see the light. I’m convinced that those who come around are generally the ones who haven’t yet been exposed to the truth, very similar to how most young conservatives make a point of praising Martin Luther King before someone sets them straight about the mythology they are unwittingly promoting. It’s too obvious—such conversions shouldn’t take too long.

Jihadist Muslims in Europe are the invading Orcs. But the real enemy is Sauron (the subversive Jew).

–C.T.

My own comment for this blog…

At the beginning of the last year I still was, like Fjordman and most of the people in the counter-jihad movement, a staunch philo-Semite. But as Scott says, a couple of conversations about the Jewish Question set the philo-Semitic mythology straight in my mind, just as when Gandalf revealed Wormtongue for what he was, the bewitched Théoden, king of Rohan, returned to his senses.

But Fjordman is no Théoden. In Peter Jackson’s filmic interpretation of the Denethor character, the Steward of Gondor, Gandalf warns Denethor that Sauron is now ready to strike and urges him to call Rohan for aid. Denethor declines…

Like Denethor, Fjordman, who has been confronted by the dissident voices of the current narrative, has chosen to dissociate the whole Sauron problem to avoid any cognitive dissonance whatsoever. Like the Denethor of the movie, Fjordman’s sin of dishonesty comes from intellectual cowardice.

Denethors won’t ever see the light. They’re too far gone. Let’s focus on the potential Théodens instead…

Holocaust

A nationalist reading of the “Holocaust”

Post author By C .T.
Post date June 10, 2011
2 Comments on A nationalist reading of the “Holocaust”

The chosen image for Irmin Vinson's site

Good articles about the so-called Holocaust are extremely difficult to find either in mainstream media or in the tiny white nationalist scene. Counter-Currents’ most recent article, “Holocaust Commemoration” by Irmin Vinson is the best introduction to this thorny subject I have read so far. It is a long read (14,000+ words) but worth of every minute spent. Every nationalist must read it and I hope more articles by Vinson will appear at CC.

More than the revelations of the main text, what shocked me the most was endnote #1:

On the subject of Jewish ethnocentrism, the comments of Talmudic scholar Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, a former American citizen now living in Israel, are worth noting: “If every single cell in a Jewish body entails divinity, and is thus part of God, then every strand of DNA is a part of God. Therefore, something is special about Jewish DNA… If a Jew needs a liver, can he take the liver of an innocent non-Jew to save him? The Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has an infinite value. There is something more holy and unique about Jewish life than about non-Jewish life.” Quoted in Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 43.

Tags History, Jewish question (JQ)